Just as the combatant’s acts cannot be grasped as his alone, the actions of the head of state are not his alone. Warfare is a conflict between corporate subjects, inaccessible to ordinary ideas of individual responsibility, whether of soldier or commander.

At war, states confront each other as historical actors. They are the victors and losers; their history is being written. Warfare is the suffering of the sovereign body.

The citizen combatant’s death is always a sacrifice. Dying for the state is not a negation, but an affirmation. To return to theological language, it is ‘life through death’ – the life of the nation.

The enemy is not killed as an individual. He remains the enemy even if he has done nothing wrong – indeed, even if he disagrees with the policies of his government. Friends can become enemies because the category has nothing to do with personal subjectivity.

Who is it that can kill and be killed outside the ordinary norms of law? International humanitarian law speaks of the combatant’s privilege, as if it were a matter of extending certain rights to an individual who meets a list of formal qualifications.

This gives us only a negative view of what is at stake: the combatant’s privilege protects the individual from legal prosecution for the injury he causes.

The celebration of the combatant is not, however, grounded in his legal immunities. Rather, immunity is a formal reflection of a positive quality: the combatant has about him something of the quality of the sacred. His acts are not entirely his own. They generate awe and respect incommensurate with law, the domain of which is the ordinary and everyday.

The very point of law is to normalize, which is why sacrifice is always beyond law. The combatant is not individually responsible for his actions because those acts are no more his than ours. Legally, we construct this as a matter of role and command hierarchy: his role is to follow orders, except under extraordinary circumstances.

Just as the combatant’s acts cannot be grasped as his alone, the actions of the head of state are not his alone. Behind the paradox is an intuition that warfare is a conflict between corporate subjects, inaccessible to ordinary ideas of individual responsibility, whether of soldier or commander. The moral accounting for war was the suffering of the nation itself – not a subsequent legal response to individual actors.

At war, states confront each other as historical actors. They are the victors and losers; their history is being written. Warfare is the suffering of the sovereign body. That is what is at stake when we imagine the killing of war as sacrifice.

The citizen combatant’s death is always a sacrifice. Dying for the state is not a negation, but an affirmation. To return to theological language, it is ‘life through death’ – the life of the nation. Corporate identity has informed both sides in war between modern states. The enemy is not killed as an individual. He remains the enemy even if he has done nothing wrong – indeed, even if he disagrees with the policies of his government. Friends can become enemies because the category has nothing to do with personal subjectivity.

The enemy is always faceless because we do not care about his personal history any more than we care about his hopes for the future. Once there is a return to the normal, one-time enemies can come to see each other as uniquely bound to each other; they have shared an extraordinary experience. We see this today in the gatherings of veterans from both sides of World War II. Nothing need be forgiven, for despite the killing and destruction no one did anything wrong. In some deep sense, no one did anything at all.

The popular sovereign is the direct successor to the mystical corpus of the sacral monarch. The metaphysics here is Christological – the mystical body of the Church is the paradigm – but the phenomenon has broader roots. The erotic character of the political community is expressed in this notion of corporate identity.

In and through the popular sovereign, we are one with those who came before and those who will come after. Corporate identity lies behind the sense of intergenerational responsibility that informs much of our political ethos: the nation is responsible for its past wrongs just as it is responsible to those not yet living.

This imaginative figure of corporate personhood helps to explain the extraordinary character of modern warfare. Popular sovereignty unleashes a seemingly limitless potential for mass violence by making every citizen of equal moment within the corporate body. Any citizen can pick up arms and claim to act as the sovereign.

He needs no legal warrant. Government may make no better claim to speak in the sovereign voice than the lone resistor. Out of this arises the informal warfare of the partisan and the guerilla. This is the heroic side of the radical egalitarianism of sovereign violence.

Whatever else modernity produced, it brought about an extraordinary willingness to kill and be killed. There was an almost unfathomable carelessness with lives. This occurred in the same states that were building legal regimes of social welfare. We simply cannot understand this within any calculation of individual well-being. We can describe it as inefficient and unjust, but still it exists. To understand the existential character of the modern state, we need a political theology of popular sovereignty as corporate agency.

Can the American people imagine a moment of surrender? Is not that imagined resistance what a policy of mutual assured destruction rests upon? Predictably, the IHL project broke down in the face of both the threat of weapons of mass destruction between the superpowers and the tactics of terrorism in the wars of decolonization. These, however, have been exactly the characteristic forms of warfare of the post-World War II era. Both expose IHL as a project with uncertain democratic roots.

It would oppose a law of individual responsibility to a corporate political phenomenon. This problem continues, for the contemporary terrorist attack is a political spectacle of the corporate body. There is nothing personal, nothing about the individual subject, in the choice of target.

The message conveyed is that political identity alone is a ground for killing and being killed. Sending that message is the contemporary form of the declaration of war. Perception of the message turns the victim into the sacrificial body of the state, and the terrorist into the enemy.

Of all the things that organized communities do, going to war is surely the most difficult to understand. Familiarity does not make the task of understanding any easier. War depends upon a willingness of individuals to imagine themselves performing the two most difficult acts: killing and being killed. The close and intimate relationship between these two acts suggests that we should think of warfare as reciprocal acts of self-sacrifice. Each side believes it must kill, just as each is willing to die.

Figuratively, it is the willingness to die that creates the license to kill; formally, the reciprocity of threat grounds the doctrine of the combatant’s privilege; politically, every war is justified as one of self-defense on both sides. The internal ethos of modern warfare arises out of the imagined reciprocal imposition of sacrificial risk.